The Memorable Concerts of 2019

Once again I had to wait beyond the halfway point of this month before taking fair stock of what emerged as particularly memorable during the last month of the year. (For the record I began taking stock of the other eleven months shortly after the beginning of this month. There was a lot on my plate this year; so I figured that I had better give my memory plenty of time to account for things, particularly those furthest in the past.) As I put it last year, there were “several vigorous contenders” for this month; and it was hard to shake the feeling that I was trying to make a choice between a very juicy orange and a delightfully tasty apple. Nevertheless, the results are now in and may be accounted for month-by-month as follows with the usual hyperlinks:

January: Ran Dank plays Frederic Rzewski’s “The People United Will Never Be Defeated!” This was the “opening night” concert in the 2019 PIVOT Series presented by San Francisco Performances (SFP). I have never been modest in my admiration for this set of 36 variations on a political anthem. As far as I am concerned, this was a twentieth-century approach to variations on a theme that would hold its own beside the nineteenth-century efforts of both Ludwig van Beethoven and Johannes Brahms. As might be guessed, there is no shortage of content for mind to discover, meaning that this is music that deserved more than one listening experience. In that context my iteration with Dank was particularly informative for discovering that Sergei Rachmaninoff was lurking in Rzewski’s score along with Beethoven and Brahms!

February: Little Roxie screens performance of Erling Wold’s “Rattensturm” opera. Sometimes the only option for seeing a new opera is by attending a screening of a video document of its performance. This was the case for Erling Wold’s opera “Rattensturm.” To the best of my knowledge, this has only been performed by the Klagenfurter Ensemble, named after the capital of Carinthia in Austria, in commemoration of the end of World War I. The plot concerned the sinking of the Austro-Hungarian Navy vessel SMS Szent István, which was presumed to be “unsinkable.” However, this had nothing to do with negligent disregard of icebergs. Rather, the vessel was brought down during its maiden voyage by an Italian torpedo boat led by a captain with a combination of knowledge and instinct for clever maneuvers. As the opera’s title suggests, a Greek chorus of five rats contributes to the telling of this tale; and both words and music were thoroughly riveting throughout the opera’s 90-minute duration.

March: Voices of Music concludes season with Bach and Handel. The final concert of the Voices of Music season featured an impressive variety of visiting instrumental and vocal soloists. The instrumentalists were flutist Emi Ferguson, oboist Marc Schachman, and bassoonist Anna Marsh. The vocalists were soprano Amanda Forsythe and tenor Thomas Cooley. Most of the selections were secular, although there was an opening Sinfonia from Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 156 cantata Ich steh mit einem Fuß in Grabe (I am standing with one foot in the grave) for which Schachman provided a ravishing oboe solo. However, he dazzled just as much as soloist in George Frideric Handel’s HWV 287 oboe concerto in G minor. Over the course of the entire program, Baroque music never sounded so refreshing.

April: Lamplighters presents G&S++. Lamplighters Music Theatre presented their latest approach to putting a twist on a well-known Gilbert and Sullivan (G&S) operetta with Arthur Sullivan’s setting of W. S. Gilbert’s clever rhymes. “Trial by Jury” is a one-act farce about the British legal system; and it is the shortest of all of the G&S collaborations. The Lamplighters’ production team decided it could do with a what-happened-next second act. All the music was by Sullivan, but new words were introduced to accommodate the new plot. Many of the jokes were directed at G&S specialists; but plenty (including a reference to the Rolling Stones) were accessible to the entire audience.

May: Juraj Valčuha brings dark Shostakovich to San Francisco Symphony (SFS). 2019 saw three SFS programs that “made the cut” for this list, two by returning visitors and one by a conductor making her debut. The familiar visitor was Valčuha, and he made the bold move of presenting Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 65 (eighth) symphony in C minor. Composed at a time when World War II had worn Shostakovich down into a depressing state of weariness, this symphony is regarded by many as the composer’s darkest creation. Valčuha summoned up that darkness with a clear appreciation of all the sophisticated detail that Shostakovich had invested in his score.

June: San Francisco Opera (SFO) presents Rusalka. Where opera was concerned, two SFO productions “made the cut.” The first of these was performed during the spring season, and it was a new production of Antonín Dvořák’s best known opera, his Opus 114 Rusalka. The music for this opera is thoroughly engaging, but the opera itself tends to get neglected because of its relatively convoluted plot in which darkness prevails. Fortunately, David McVicar’s staging made the narrative both clear and accessible. The production also marked the SFO debut of conductor Eun Sun Kim. (At the beginning of this month it was announced that Kim would be the new SFO Music Director, beginning her tenure on August 1, 2021.)

July: Merola Opera Program presents the annual Schwabacher Summer Concert. Many “showcase” opera offerings tend to overwhelm the audience with more unrelated episodes than mind can be expected to process. On the other hand the annual Schwabacher event is regularly structured around a more limited number of staged scenes of more extended length. This season the program had two generously extensive “bookends” with three briefer episodes between them. Staging was by Merola alumnus Jose Maria Condemi, and the attentive viewer was drawn into just the right blend of convincing dramatization and dramatically perceptive vocal deliveries of the music.

August: West Edge Opera presents Breaking the Waves. The high point of this summer’s West Edge Opera series of full-length opera productions was Missy Mazzoli’s Breaking the Waves. The title comes from a 1996 film by Lars von Trier, whose pugnacious approach to matters of both religion and sex often succeeded in alienating his viewers. Mazzoli worked with a libretto by Royce Vavrek that did not blunt any of von Trier’s sharp edges. However, through her music (and perhaps through changes in social mores since von Trier’s film was first screened) one could appreciate the full scope of tensions in the narrative without feeling beaten by a sledge hammer. Viewing this opera was as intense an experience as one encounters in a well-directed production of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck; but the mere fact that one can talk about Mazzoli’s opera in the same sentence as Berg’s should affirm the significance of her effort.

September: SFO presents a new production of Billy Budd. Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd is another opera that subjects the attentive viewer with almost non-stop tension from beginning to end. SFO presented a production by Michael Grandage that was first performed at Glyndebourne in May of 2010. The revival here was staged by Ian Rutherford, but there was no short-changing the intensity of either the narrative or the music through which that narrative is conveyed. Much of that intensity was due to how Christopher Oram, making his SFO debut, created a chillingly claustrophobic setting of the British man-of-war Indomitable. That atmosphere was reinforced by the extensive diversity of people on board, whose musical contributions were managed impeccably by Chorus Director Ian Robertson, consistently working effectively with conductor Lawrence Renes.

October: Karina Canellakis makes SFS debut. Like Valčuha, Canellakis prepared a program organized primarily around a symphony composed by Shostakovich during World War II. She selected the predecessor of Opus 65, the Opus 60 (seventh) symphony, dedicated “To the City of Leningrad.” While Shostakovich was working on the symphony, the Nazi forces began their siege of the city on September 8, 1941; and that siege would not conclude until January 17, 1944. Canellakis could not have not a better job in her command of the rhetoric of tension that Shostakovich packed into this symphony. Lesser conductors have reduced this score to little more than militarist clichés. However, Canellakis knew where the musical rhetoric resided and never wavered in conveying her knowledge to the attentive listener.

November: Simone Young brings operatic Wagner to Davies. The last of the SFS programs was a concert performance of the first act of Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre conducted by Simone Young. There is enough drama in this single act to fill an entire evening’s program; and the action in the libretto is sufficiently minimal that a concert performance is viable. (This was my own second encounter with a concert performance of this act.) There are only three vocalists for the roles of Siegmund (tenor Stuart Skelton), Sieglinde (soprano Emily Magee, making her SFS debut), and Hunding (bass Ain Anger). All three of them could not have worked with Young more effectively to convey the intense dramatic impact of this scene, while Young consistently reinforced that impact on the instrumental side of the balance.

December: Jamie Barton presents an “equal opportunity” SFP recital. I realize that I am not the first to observe that Barton prepared a project in which the time allocated to women composers was approximately the same as that allotted to the men. What matters, however, is that the music by the women was just as diverse and compelling as that encountered among the more familiar men. In other words there is a rich untapped repertoire out there just waiting for suitable performance platforms. It may not be as large as the catalogs of the male composers, but it is still significant. Barton gave a convincing account of every selection on her program, and her strategy should be followed by both male and female vocalists. This was an evening in which the social agenda was able to share the platform with the music agenda and inspire both performers and audiences to seek out similar situations.